Quotes About Memory

This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.

I am...sad and angry. I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.

Lots of people I know have bootlegged tapes of performances and if they play it I will be transported back sometimes with happiness, sometimes with horror.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

But history does matter. There are lines connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. They are obviously morbid. Really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents' story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities.

Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.

Tea is the tast of my land:it is bitter and warm,strong,and sharp with memory.It tastes of longing.It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.Also it vanishes-the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.It disappears,like plantations stretching up into the mist.I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.How sad that must make you-like children who long for absent mothers.I am sorry.

With this girl – girl three in the queue – her story had made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even curious.

She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.

But the film in your memory, your cannot walk out so easily.Wherever you go it is always playing

The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it" [p.181].

He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.

A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine, mothering a son, and burying a husband. A human being, though, is a different thing entirely.

We were joined by what happened on the beach. Getting rid of her would be like losing a part of me. It would be like shedding a finger, or a name. I wasn't going to let that happen again.

But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

The past is never there when you try to go back. It exists, but only in memory. To pretend otherwise is to invite a mess.

While attending the carding machines," he would later recall, "I used to place the dictionary on the desk—by which I passed every two minutes in feeding the machine and removing the rolls—and in this way I would have a moment in which to look at a word and read its definition and could then fix it in my memory." As an adult, the boy who practiced with his dictionary would own a personal library of more than four thousand volumes.

Don't known how I'll be remembered, but I hope it is with that kind of fondness, the selfless guy who took lots of pictures but was never in them. Perfect.

Haley remembered another bit of Irish wisdom, something her dad said all the time: "Never bolt your door with a boiled carrot!" She

In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.